Mental Brain

Anxiety is a survival skill gone haywire. It happens when our brain is working so hard to protect us that it forgets to notice that the danger has passed. It feels like choking, stifling, smothering, tingling, panicking - our brains cut out and we start to make bad decisions - all normal anxiety reactions. Dr. Faith G. Harper, author of the best-selling This is Your Brain on Depression packs a ton of knowledge and help into this practical manual.

Our brain is recreating the world in its own way—most of the time for our own good: how hard would it be if, before making a choice, we had to know about all the options available in a given situation? Luckily, our brain can estimate: it allows us to reconstruct the world as we know it, and live in it. However, these very useful mechanisms can sometimes mislead us and have a rather negative impact on our actions, beliefs and opinions: when our brain behaves that way, we say it is biased. Albert Moukheiber gives us tips and tricks to fight against these cognitive biases.

Two New York Times best-selling authors unveil new research showing what meditation can really do for the brain. In the last 20 years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us.

A leading neuroplasticity researcher and the coauthor of the groundbreaking books Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the structure and neuronal firing patterns of the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from OCD, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions. In You Are Not Your Brain, Schwartz and Gladding carefully outline their program.

Why is it easier to ruminate over hurt feelings than it is to bask in the warmth of being appreciated? Because your brain evolved to learn quickly from bad experiences and slowly from good ones, but you can change this.

Throughout our life, we look for ways to keep our minds sharp and effortlessly productive. Now, globetrotting neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta offers “the book all of us need, young and old” (Walter Isaacson, number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Code Breaker) with insights from top scientists all over the world, whose cutting-edge research can help you heighten and protect brain function and maintain cognitive health at any age.

Peter Shankman is a busy guy - a media entrepreneur who runs several businesses, gives keynote speeches around the world, hosts a popular podcast, runs marathons and Iron Mans, is a licensed skydiver, dabbles in angel investing, and is a loving father to his young daughter. Simply put, he always seems to have more than 24 hours in a day. How does he do it? Peter attributes his unusually high energy level and extreme productivity to his ADHD.

Women's brain health is no longer a niche topic. Neuroscience is uncovering answers to questions women have pondered for generations - demystifying everything from puberty, periods, contraception, pregnancy, sex and love to menopause, hormone therapy and dementia. Understanding how the brain is shaped by genetics, hormones and life experiences is vital for women to maintain their health and embrace their unique strengths at every stage of life.

This breakthrough book presents a disarmingly simple idea: The way we pay attention in daily life can play a critical role in our health and well-being. According to Dr. Les Fehmi, a clinical psychologist and researcher, many of us have become stuck in “narrow-focus attention”: a tense, constricted, survival mode of attention that holds us in a state of chronic stress - and which lies at the root of common ailments including anxiety, depression, ADD, stress-related migraines, and more.

In You Have a Brain: A Teen's Guide to T.H.I.N.K. B.I.G., Dr. Carson unpacks the eight important parts of thinking big--talent, honesty, integrity, being nice, knowledge, books, in-depth learning, and God--and presents the stories of people who demonstrated those things in his life. By applying the idea of T.H.I.N.K. B.I.G. to your life, and by looking at those around you as well, you too can overcome obstacles and work toward achieving your dreams.

Neuroscientific discoveries have begun to illuminate the workings of the active brain in intricate detail. In fact, sometimes it seems that in order to be a cutting-edge therapist, not only do you need knowledge of traditional psychotherapeutic models, but a solid understanding of the role the brain plays as well. But theory is never enough. You also need to know how to apply the theories to work with actual clients during sessions.

It has never been harder to focus than it is now. We live in a noisy, crowded, stressful world that changes so fast, we’re always running to catch up. Traditional education doesn’t give us the skills to manage. And if you live largely in your own head, techniques like mindfulness fall short. In extremes, we turn to external solutions like social media, alcohol, and recreational drugs, just to get some space from our own thoughts.

Strengthen your social and emotional intelligence by cultivating your innate somatic intelligence. This is powerful applied mind-body science, in the workplace and beyond. Tap the intelligence hidden in posture, gesture, and sensation and you will open the door to more meaning, greater courage, deeper connection, and more powerful leadership than you imagined possible.

If you’ve ever been so pissed off that you did things that you regretted, or ruined your own day and some other people’s, too, this book is for you. Or if you feel angry every single day and it’s affecting your health and sleep and love of life. Or if you have very good reasons to be mad as hell, and you aren’t going to take it anymore. Or if you’ve repressed your anger all your life and now it’s all coming out at once.

The human brain is an extraordinary machine. Its ability to process information and adapt to circumstances by reprogramming itself is unparalleled and it remains the best source of inspiration for recent developments in artificial intelligence. In How We Learn, Stanislas Dehaene decodes the brain's biological mechanisms, delving into the neuronal, synaptic, and molecular processes taking place. He explains why youth is such a sensitive period, but assures us that our abilities continue into adulthood and that we can enhance our learning and memory at any age.

Most of us would agree that there’s a clear—and even obvious—connection between the things we believe and the way we behave. But what if our actions are driven not by our conscious values and beliefs but by hidden motivations we’re not even aware of? The “hidden brain” is Shankar Vedantam’s shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside our conscious awareness but have a decisive effect on how we behave.

Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until now, researchers have treated these conditions as different, but they actually lie along a continuum. Dr. Elizabeth Stanley explains the significance of this continuum, how it affects our resilience in the face of challenge, and why an event that's stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another.

In Trauma and Memory, best-selling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.

A prescriptive guide to restoring cognitive calm, based on Amen Clinics chief psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Annibali’s three decades of treating patients who suffer from overloaded, overstimulated brains. Dr. Joseph Annibali has treated thousands of people with overloaded, overstimulated brains. Some people describe their brain as being “in chaos”; others feel that their brain is “on fire”. But whether they are ultimately diagnosed with anxiety, disabling OCD, depression, bipolar disorder, or even substance abuse, the underlying problem is a "Too-Busy Brain".

Experienced clinician Sebern Fisher keenly demonstrates neurofeedback’s profound ability to help treat one of the most intractable mental health concerns of our time: severe childhood abuse, neglect, or abandonment, otherwise known as developmental trauma. A mix of fundamental theory and nuts-and-bolts practice, the audiobook delivers a carefully articulated and accessible look at the mind and brain in developmental trauma, what a “trauma identity” looks like, and how neurofeedback can be used to retrain the brain, thereby fostering a healthier, more stable state of mind.